It’s fun reading through the posts since this morning. Fact of the matter, there are only so many hours in one day and most kids are getting up, eating and on the way to and from and in school around 8 hours a day, add another 6-8 for sleep and you are at 13-16 which leaves the amount of time left over for sports or ECs and dinner. Many spend around 3 hours a day on homework which leaves around 5 hours a day plus or minus for everything else and weekends. Some kids fill up that time and others fill up some of that time :-).
@lindagaf I honestly don’t think my D will be going to Vanderbilt despite the good grades etc. She likes her downtime too much! She loves Netflix… Anyway, if things go according to plan she’ll do a filmmaking/screenwriting class for 10 weeks at a local college, join a youth theater ensemble and volunteer a couple of hours each week. Nothing requires loads of time. It’s stuff she wants to do, but part of her is doing things because she knows she has to to get what she wants. I honestly think that if she didn’t dance she would be more energetic for other things. Thanks again to you and others for giving me food for thought
I think if you hear about all the activities kids are doing you also have to realize that the time commitment can vary wildly. For example,@mathmom mentioned “For older son he did Academic Team which met 1 hour a week and had morning tournaments I’d guess at least once a month.” This is one of the teams my kids have also done, and it meets 8 hours per week, with weekly competitions which take about 4 hours. Also, some schools have scheduled time for what would be before or after school in other schools (ours makes some minimal time for clubs but that’s about all the help they give for ECs). Or they do other things to make it easier for kids to participate. For instance, it would really help our athletes if they could skip PE class and get a study hall, at least during the sport season, but our school doesn’t allow that. Some apparently do.
My kids just do the stuff they want to do. Older kid didn’t like to be crazily busy and she didn’t spend as much time with ECs as younger kid does. Both my kids have dropped and picked up activities. Colleges didn’t seem to mind. I would not tell your kid to do activities to look good to colleges. It should be a time for them to explore interests.
My daughter did only 2 ECs during the school year - piano and newspaper - she had weekly piano lessons and practiced most days, the school newspaper came out monthly and the week it was published involved significant time (senior year she was editor in chief and was section editor another year). She did her volunteering ECs over the summer - in the library and at a historic site. She did do probably 5-6 hours of homework each night throughout most of HS (high level classes and perfectionist personality). She was also an avid reader (hundreds of books a year). These were things she enjoyed doing. She got into excellent colleges.
Our S19 has XC for 2.5 hours six days a week and usually a meet once a week for about five hours. He refs soccer on the weekends so that’s about 5 more hours. He will do indoor/outdoor track and join an ultimate frisbee team for winter/spring so that will increase a bit with ultimate having Sat afternoon practices and Sun afternoon games in the spring. He also takes an art class once a week for three hours but the time committed to art will start ramping up next year when he has AP Studio Art and then AP Portfolio. We find that he does ok with his honors/AP classes as long as he’s home by 6:00. No socializing time, though. It’s dinner and homework until 11:00 or so and then to bed.
Our eighth grader will have the more challenging EC of the two. She’s a ballet dancer and the commitment is substantial. Class M-F from 5:30-8:30 and, on T/Th, they tack on show rehearsal (Nutcracker, etc) so the kids dance from 5:30-10:00. Saturday class/rehearsal is from 9-5. And then there are the shows which are done for audiences all over our city on certain weekends in the winter and spring. I worry very much about how homework with honors and AP classes will get done. On a T or Th, she will have exactly two hours to do homework and then it’s off to dance and not home until 10:15 and then still will want to shower/snack. Other ballerinas at our high school have lessened their class loads and maybe not taken on the rigor they could have. We will cross that bridge when we come to it but I’m more likely to keep her in the right classes and ask to bow out of some shows. That would be unprecedented but I feel like we’d have to ask and see what we can work out.
D was not an athlete. She danced, but stop competing in dance after freshman year because the time commitment was too draining. She continued to dance in her high school’s Orchesis, which was much less demanding, even though she was in the senior troupe and took a leadership role. She was also involved in various school publications (senior editor of two), band, science ECs, honor society, and some (not a lot) volunteer work. All told, my guess is approximately 15-20 hours a week on average. Which was pretty typical of the “leader kids” in her large high school. By junior year, virtually all of her classes were AP and she didn’t have any free periods or study halls (not even lunch her senior year). High school was jam-packed and very “busy.” I think she’s finding college more focused and contemplative.
^^I would guess 15-20 is close to the norm for college bound active teens. Even back in the day I was super busy and graduated with what would be a spectacular college admissions application even in today’s terms, but if I stop and add it up it falls in that 15-20 pretty much with some busier weekends. It’s just not possible to do “more” and put forth genuine effort whether it’s a sport or a job or an arts passion or whatever and still develop good study habits that will carry over to college where frankly the kids have much more “free time” that they need to learn to structure themselves. But I’m not one of those book 'em up parents, I wanted my kids to develop a couple interests on their own including one life-time sport and go from there.
@EllieMom if only high school could be more focused and contemplative. Our S19 already wanting that so much. He wants out of the rat race. It’s interesting to get little bits of info from him that may help us find the right schools. He loves the idea of one class at a time (Colorado College) and no grades/open curriculum (Brown). The reality is that he will have to excel at the rat race in order to get into schools like that!
Good to know what kids did/are doing EC-wise out there. My middle school son wants to do sports three seasons a year, participate in several other ECs, keep a 4.0 GPA, and go to parties often. I’ll see how he manages that and what he really picks, drops, and keeps. As a parent I think I should see he manages his time well and gets 8+ hours of sleep each night.
Sleep is super important, especially for the athletes, dancers, etc. They are pushing their bodies and they need to rest and rebuild.
This is a Featured Thread!! Yay! So appreciative for all the posts and wisdom here. Thanks all.
Hi @citymama9 ! My ballet dancer daughter dances/rehearses between 15-20 hours per week during performance season (mid September through mid May) and 25-30 during dress rehearsal/tech week. She does a few hours of instrumental music practice per week on top of that. There is simply no time for anything else. I think she’ll have more unscheduled time when she heads off to college.
D21 does about 10 hours per week of ECs, about 2/3 athletics-related and 1/3 performing arts. I doubt that will ramp up significantly when she gets to HS as she loves to write and sets aside time for that.
@homerdog We had our daughter back off on the ballet for her junior year and it was a wise choice. She still performed but didn’t do the full company schedule. She also participated in that decision - extrapolating from the demands during sophomore year, she realized that she was going to need the extra time for college counseling, test prep, etc. She did not back off on class rigor at any point. However, she will not be pursuing a professional career in dance. If your daughter aspires to that, your family’s choices may differ. Also, a number of serious dancers we know have opted for home schooling to accommodate the demanding schedule.
I was going to mention this, also.
I also failed to mention that I urged my S to switch to cross country for his fall sport from soccer, partially because the soccer rules were so punitive. If the kid had an orthodontist appt, for example, it was longer than the usual dentist appt and could not be scheduled for 4:30. So the kid had to either schedule it during the day and miss actual classes, for which there was no punishment, or miss soccer practice. If the kid missed soccer practice, he was punished by being made to suit up and sit on the bench at the next game. If a kid missed an actual game–in one kid’s case to attend a family wedding–he was punished by being made to suit up and sit on the bench for TWO games. Soccer practice is more important than, say, your AP Bio class? Your sister’s wedding? Just asinine and bloated self-importance on the part of the coach, IMHO.
@mamaedefamilia I agree about junior year. That’s the tentative plan…to back off of some performances that year. Also, I want her to study for ACT or SAT summer before junior year and get those tests done before Nutcracker season. It’s a reasonable option for her since she will already have finished pre-calc sophomore year.
No professional ballerina here although she’d like to dream about that. She dances with a handful of kids who homeschool but she does not want to go that route. Loves her school friends and her school and she’s looking forward to going to our high school. Some of the ballerinas who have “graduated” from the studio have gone to professional companies but most either major in dance in college or figure out a way to keep ballet in their lives somehow. Some colleges will let you take class without being a major or a minor and some colleges are near professional companies where you could still take class (for a fee!) and audition if you have time. I think she will probably end up doing something like that.
Our sports are 6th period PE. Most practice starting at 1:55 (start of last/sixth period) through about 4:30.
Cross country is lovely with its flexibility. Missing a run is ok several times during the season as long as you text a screen shot of your makeup run to the coach.
@VickiSoCal That’s great about XC!! I feel like parents should find out that stuff about their high school before they spend thousands of dollars and many, many hours on sports that just don’t work out at the high school level. Our S19 does XC and it’s not quite as flexible as your XC but certainly better than other team sports at our high school.
Another parent of a dancer. 
Mine spends about 25 hours/week on dance classes but decided this year not to do Nutcracker until she gets a feel for high school (she’s a freshman). She is also involved in a few school clubs but they don’t seem to have the time constraints at this point. So far she is managing to keep her 4.0 with several honors Pre-AP type classes. She is one of those crazy people who just doesn’t seem to require as much sleep as most people. She never took naps, even as a baby, and rarely sleeps more than 6 hours a night. So, she manages. She also seems to have enough time to feed her Netflix and social addictions. Other people might not be able to maintain this same schedule. So, how do you know when you have too many extracurricular activities? When it affects your child - whether that’s not getting enough sleep, not doing homework, grades falling, or a personality change. As a parent, you know your child best and what he or she can handle. Don’t go by what works for someone else.
D20 is doing really, really well at XC so far and I’ve bought a pair of shoes and about 20 dollars on team fees.
If she gets a scholarship or even anything out of it I will feel like it was a total steal compared to what we’ve dropped on club swimming over the years. Don’t even want to contemplate that.
And the time commitment is a bit less than swimming. I think you can’t flat out run as long as you can swim, your body just can’t take it.
I don’t see D21 doing a lot of ECs in high school. We are auto merit chasing. She needs her alone time to chill and recharge.
@carachel2 - Our school requires the EE to be completed and turned in on the first day of 12th grade so she will be doing that over the summer! We don’t live in the US so we don’t have the same opportunities for activities/jobs that others have. In addition to what I mentioned, she has received permission to do 4 HLs. She has a priority list of her activities and knows what has to give if something does! Lucky for us we have had a few days of police shut down of our city so all the kids have been forced to be at home catching up on rest and HW!! (Trying to see the bright side!)